I have an ABit motherboard with Via VT8237 on board sound and a Realtek ALC658D chip, for which I'm using snd_via82xx. I have version 1.0.12_rc1 of alsa-driver, alsa-headers, alsa-lib, alsa-tools, and alsa-utils installed on my Gentoo x86_64 system.
I have a 5.1 powered speaker system connected to three 1/8" stereo jacks and speaker-test, mplayer, and xine produce surround sound when I use the ALSA "surround51" device. There are quite a few mixer controls and they mostly seem to work as expected, except that both the PCM and Master volume controls (including mute) only affect the front, stereo speakers. This is suboptimal, since I have to adjust four different values in alsamixer (Master, Surround, Center, and LFE) to keep them balanced. I'm pretty sure this is not correct behavior. Another mixer control that puzzles me is "Surround Jack Mode." It toggles between "Shared" and "Independent", but I don't know what that means. I haven't been able to notice any difference between the two settings. Based on previous posts to this list, I think the hardware does not have a Master volume control, requiring the use of the ALSA "softvol" plugin. Indeed, the file "/usr/share/alsa/cards/VIA8237.conf" refers to softvol, though I don't understand the configuration language well enough yet to understand exactly what it's doing. I'm guessing that with the proper configuration of softvol, the Master control will work as expected. If no one else knows about this problem, I'll try to figure out how to get that working. Jonathan Rogers Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Alsa-user mailing list Alsa-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user
